The big beast barely twitched.

I stood there, balanced on his back, my talons holding lightly to the thick old gray leather. So far, so good. But you can't acquire new DNA when you're in a morph. I had to be human to do it. And that was going to be tricky.

I looked off toward the high railing where people were watching the rhinos meander. With my falcon vision, they seemed shockingly close. I could see the color of their eyes. I could see a loose button on one guy's shirt. Of course, they

only had human eyes. They couldn't see nearly as well as I could.

It doesn't matter, I told myself grimly. No time to worry. Do it.

I began to demorph. On the rhino's back. My falcon feathers began to melt and run together, confusing their neat geometric patterns. My talons grew less sharp, thicker, clumsier, with extra toes beginning to grow. I heard a deep, internal grinding sound as my human bones began to stretch out of the hollow bird bones.

I was already twice as heavy on the rhinoceros's back. Would he throw me off and trample me? No time to worry. Would the people notice what was happening? No time to worry. I had to trust Tobias.

And that's when I saw him swoop down from the sky and snatch a cotton candy from a little girl's hand as easily as he snatched mice from the grass.

Swooop! And off he went with the bright pink fluff ball. The girl yelled, the people around all gaped and laughed and pointed. Tobias began to put on an aerial display worthy of the Blue Angels at an air show.

No one was watching me as my lumpy human shape emerged from the sleek falcon's body. But I was still on the back of the rhino. On the back of a two-thousand-pound behemoth with a three-foot-long horn.

The rhino moved! But he was just ambling over to greener grass.

I continued to demorph. Then, all of a sudden, the rhino noticed.

"Ffmraha!" he snorted. He broke into a trot. I had no hands yet. No talons anymore, either. I rolled off and lay face down in the dust.

Come on, Jake, morph!

The rhinoceros towered above me. It was like lying down on the ground beside a truck. He blinked one eye at me. And then he lowered his massive horn.

Sniff. Sniff.

That face, that horn, hovered inches from me, as the rhinoceros sniffed me and I prayed he wouldn't impale me. He was growing more agitated. He was upset by what he was watching. No surprise. It would have upset me, too, watching a boy squirm and mutate his way out of a bird.

And then I had a hand. I stuck it out, half-blind, and touched the horn.

I wrapped my still-emerging fingers halfway round it, and I focused with all my mind.

When you acquire animals, they go into a sort of trance. Except sometimes they don't. And if

this was one of those times, the rhino would trample me and use me for target practice with his horn.

I focused on the beast. I focused and felt him become a part of me.

We raced back from The Gardens. I was exhausted. Tobias was exhausted. We had no choice. Time was running out.

The wind had shifted. It wasn't in our faces, but it was strong from the south and we were flying west. We kept having to fight our way back on course.

Marco and Cassie were waiting in the trees across the road from Fenestre's front gate. Their time in morph was short, too. As short as Rachel's and Ax's time.

"Marco! Cassie!" I yelled down. "Anything happen?"

"Yeah, the clock kept ticking," Marco said.

"We noticed one thing," Cassie said. "Thank goodness for these eyes. We saw you were right not to try and sneak inside in some kind of insect morph. There's a band of poison around each door. And some kind of bug zapper in the windows. That must be what shocked Rachel. I think Mr. Fenestre has some psychological problems."

"He can afford them," Marco said. "Now what are we doing to get Rachel and Ax out of there?"

"l'm going to knock down the fences, kick in the door, and stomp anything or anyone that gets in my way," I said.

"Cool." Marco laughed with a touch of his now-strained humor. "Rachel would approve. But how?"

I landed on the ground at the base of the tree. "You guys get ready. I'm hoping Mr. Fenestre built that place with high ceilings and wide hallways^

I demorphed as quickly as I could. I stayed in human form for only a few seconds, then focused my thoughts on the rhinoceros.

It is unbelievably tiring to morph rapidly like that. You feel like your body is running on one half-dead double-A battery. But I could be tired later, not now.

The first change was my skin. It went from delicate human of the pink variety, to something like inch-thick leather that's been out in the sun for ten years. It thickened and rippled all over. I

was still human, but gray and massive. It was like wearing living armor.

My legs thickened and shortened. My fingers withered away. Only the fingernails remained and they became hard and big as irons. I fell forward onto all fours, a growing mass of gray, like molten steel bubbling and reforming.

I felt my ears crawl up the side of my head. They elongated, then curled to form open tubes.

And then, last of all, my face. My entire face simply began to stretch.

Out and out and out. The bones of my face and skull grew, multiplied, thickened. It was as if some busy crew of engineers were rebuilding my face, always saying, "We need more here, more support there, more armor, more strength."

My head was gigantic!

"What the ... what are you morphing?!" Marco asked.

And then, growing from the far end of my monstrously big head, the horns began to emerge.

A smaller one toward the back that grew, then stopped. And the larger horn. The one that grew and grew and grew. My eyesight was dim and badly focused, but I could see the horn sprout. Up and up it went. Thicker, larger, longer.

"0h," Marco said. "That's what you're mor-phing."

"How much time?" I asked.

"Maybe ten minutes," Tobias said.

I felt the rhino's mind emerge beneath my own human consciousness. It was not what I'd expected. This mind was not violent. In fact, the dominant instinct seemed to be simple hunger. The rhino wanted to graze.